Kissoon gets it wrong about copyright

Nov 23, 2018 Letters

Dear Editor,

I write in response to Mr. Kissoon’s column of Sunday 18th November titled “Copyright law: is colonial brainwashing still alive in Guyana ?” In it, this gentleman in citing from my letter presumes to attribute to me a colonial mentality and an “amazing ignorance of international relations”.
I find both of these assertions extremely amusing since in the first instance, I was born some time after Guyana became a Republic, and second because I have spent a number of years in the field of International IP law and Trade Law and worked with WIPO.
I have attended the meetings at the United Nations and the US Chamber of Commerce, witnessed negotiations and done scholarly work in India, the Caribbean and elsewhere, carried out peer reviewed research and published in international journals all in the work of International IP Law and policy.
Mr. Kissoon knows nothing about me, and even less about International Intellectual Property Law and Policy and its interrelations with international trade. This is quite clear from his ramblings on the subject in which he makes broad unfounded statements and drops a few names of some people whom he presumes to be authoritative, but does not present any sound scholarship to support his statements.
For him, this is supposedly good enough for Guyanese. Nothing in my letter can be ascribed to a defence of, or adherence to colonialist mentality (which is completely irrelevant within the context), though in the letter, it is established that copyright laws were instituted to allow writers and innovators to retain control of their works for a pre-determined period of time.
This allowed them to benefit from their efforts dating back to the British Statute of Monopolies of 1623. A principle as sound then as it is now and well established in international law.
It is also a paragon of fairness and decency in which people are allowed to be rewarded for their labour and this is what Mr. Kissoon seems to find so upsetting. In fact, I make it clear that any Intellectual property system must be designed around what will work best for the country since ignoring IPRs is no longer a viable position to take in 2018.
The 2012 debacle in which the government authorized commercial scale photocopying of textbooks published by a British company and was swiftly chastised by threat of legal and diplomatic sanctions forcing them to cease the activity, is a clear demonstration of how international companies and governments treat with infringement of IPRs.
There is evidence enough to prove that companies whose business activities are related to the use of IPRs are reluctant to invest in countries where the protections are weak; this includes Guyana.
It is myopic, backward, and an affront to Guyanese to say that that entire nation lacks the capacity to produce anything creative worth protecting, but Mr. Kissoon presents this hyperbolic slipshod argument for retaining the status quo.
He states that only Guyana rum and Eddy Grant are notables in the international sphere, and ignores Wilson Harris, E.R. Braithwaithe, Jan Carew , Edgar Mittleholzer, and hosts of others who have excelled in scholarship and writing.
It is disingenuous to use Rihanna as an example of Barbadian achievement since she is a product of the United States and a system, which supports artists and creators with legal and institutional frameworks that support the development of creative minds.
Rihanna acknowledges Barbados as her birthplace, just as she acknowledges her mother as Guyanese. Usain Bolt and others did not arrive at stardom on their own strength. They developed as a result of programmes and policies of the Jamaican government, which directed resources over decades to the development of athletics.
Trinidad and Barbados boast strong programmes for the development of music and the arts. These are government funded. Musicians are trained in reading of music and performance techniques, composition and arrangement.
Guyana’s policymakers have yet to conceive and implement such programmes to help creative talents. Yet they labour on. It is time that such people are rewarded for their efforts. The Kissoon philosophy, which proposes the prosperity of one group (those who create nothing) at the expense of another (creative artists) is the very expression of the colonial mentality Mr. Kissoon claims to condemn.

Sincerely,
Dr. Abiola Inniss

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